I absolutely hate having to do graphic or layout design... but I've struggled through several in the past with the last one being done on a forum. Perhaps what I did to select color schemes on that one can be something you can do to help you on this one...
On the forum I was tweaking... I already liked the general look. So my goal was mostly to just add some different color selections for everyone to select from... but all were based on the original look. The worst was coming up with an original logo for the site... I still don't like what I came up with, but but its a done deal now and the other admin, dev's and moderators selected it from the few designs I came up with.
The first thing I did was download all of the graphics for the topic/post headers, banner logo area background and icon sets. Then I played with the hue, saturation, contrast settings on a single graphic piece until I came up with a color that suited me. The hue settings is what changed the actual color... the other settings were simply done to tweak the result some. Once I found an amount of settings to change... say the original hue setting was 0 and I increased it by 20... I applied the same amount of change to all of the remaining graphics pieces. Remember to write down what each change ( hue, sat, contrast etc ) you made because you'll need it in the next step.
Next I downloaded the CSS code that controlled the text settings and other HTML based colors... I created a graphic with the same colors in it as the CSS contained... then I applied the same value increase/decrease on the hue, sat, contrast as what I used on the graphics. I then used a color tool to sample the resulting colors and wrote down what the HTML color values where originally and in the changed portion... I used a text editor on the CSS to find and replace the original values with the new values.
Finally I uploaded all of the changes into a theme scheme for the forum. I ended up with 7 total color schemes, the original and 6 new color sets.
You can see the results at
UBCD4Win Forums ... There are still areas where the resulting colors aren't exactly to my liking, the one that stands out the most in my mind is on my Maroon scheme where one of the highlighted tabs is a bit brighter of a purple/maroon than I care for... Still, I think overall they came out well and they are for the most part complimentory to each other ( ie the colors ).
Oh... and the price to have me go through that hell again... let's just say it's an absurb number and leave it at that....
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